Subjectivity and Perspectival Physicalism

Tye’s PANIC account of phenomenal states is the basis of what he calls perspectival physicalism. According to Tye, it is counter-intuitive to assume that phenomenal states are not perspectival. We know that the knowledge of physical states does not provide the knowledge of what it is like to have the experience of, say, eating a chocolate. To know what it is like to eat a chocolate or how a chocolate bar tastes, one has to eat it. This is very common sense and is intuitively true. In other words, there is something essential to the phenomenal character of any experience which one knows only when one undergoes such an experience.

But we cannot say that physical states do not play any role in the production of this experience. Any phenomenal experience does have a causal explanation in terms of physical processes. The neurobiological basis of phenomenal experience is a necessary condition for the explanation of the causal efficacy of the chocolate experience. We have the memory of the chocolate taste, which explains why we desire a chocolate bar again and again. This desire then causes us to make bodily movements to get one.

The whole exercise requires that we be able to perceptually identify and categorize the bar among other things and other chocolates. All this is a part of cognition and has a neurobiological explanation. So, we cannot completely detach the physical from the perspectival nature of the phenomenal experience. But the question is how to combine both the non-perspectival physical causes of phenomenal experience and the perspectival phenomenal experience into one theory.